Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed using Russian gas to develop Turkey into a transshipment point and exchange for natural gas. “If Turkey and our potential buyers are interested, we could consider building another gas pipeline and creating a gas hub in Turkey for sale to third countries, mainly Europe,” Putin offered his Turkish colleague Recep Tayyip According to the Interfax news agency, Erdogan attended a meeting on Thursday. In addition, a gas exchange for price determination could also be set up in Turkey, suggested Putin.
The Russian president praised the Turkstream pipeline, which runs through the Black Sea to Turkey and southern Europe, as the safest route for Russian gas. At the end of September, both lines of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline leading from Russia to Germany and one of the two lines of Nord Stream 2 in the Baltic Sea had been damaged by explosions. Representatives of the EU and NATO then spoke of sabotage. Putin himself spoke of an “international terrorist attack” on Wednesday and indicated that he believed the United States could be behind it.
The Turkstream line was also supposed to be blown up, Putin claimed, but that didn’t happen. Turkstream continues to function reliably. Therefore, Turkey is a logical choice for building a distribution point and gas exchange. “Today the prices are sky high and we could safely regulate them there to a normal market level without any political overlay,” Putin said. The meeting of the two heads of state in Astana, in central Asian Kazakhstan, took place on the sidelines of the Conference on Cooperation and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA).
Malte Küper from the Cologne Institute for Economic Research sees Turkey facing a “pioneering” decision. Ankara will have to choose between a stronger energy policy orientation towards the EU or towards Russia. He called Putin’s statements on the safest route for Russian gas a “further chapter in the use of gas supplies as an energy policy weapon.” Turkey has not yet officially commented on the proposals.
